Will Ubiquitous Computing Improve Education?

"For more than 100 years, Maine has always been in the bottom third of states-in prosperity, income, education, and opportunity for our kids. In my 30 years of working on Maine economic issues, no idea has had as much potential for leapfrogging the other states and putting Maine in a position of national leadership as this one-giving our students portable, Internet-ready computers as a basic tool for learning."
-Former Governor Angus King, who spearheaded the Maine Learning Technology Initiative

In 2002, Maine began the world's largest school laptop program, providing Apple iBooks with wireless Internet connections to 34,000 grade 7 and 8 public school students and teachers. Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Texas, and Vermont have pilot laptop programs, and dozens of schools and districts in other states support one-to-one computing.

Hundreds of thousands of K-12 students in the U.S. are using individual laptop or handheld computing devices. With the cost of computers continuing to fall, it is only a matter of time before personal, networked computing devices are used in school by millions of students.

While not all one-to-one programs are the same, many sites, including Maine, report that students are more engaged in school, demonstrate greater independence and more self-directed learning, and improve in a variety of skills, such as writing. Providing computers to all students also equalizes access to these tools for families of different economic backgrounds. Teachers and students in one-to-one classrooms have ready access to a wide range of software, electronic documents, animations, online assessments, the Internet, and other resources for teaching and learning. Teachers often report greater interaction with their students and their colleagues. Computers provide unique benefits to students with disabilities, and many special education teachers are especially enthusiastic.

Despite these promising reports, skeptics have lots to say. They claim it is too costly and difficult to provide all students with computers. They fear that without assistance, many teachers will not know how to skillfully integrate computers into teaching and learning. They warn that some students will use the devices inappropriately. Policy-makers also want better evidence that one-to-one computing will improve schooling for students, in terms of higher test scores, increased job skills, or other measures.

Whether the benefits of one-to-one computing are worth the costs may depend in part on transforming other aspects of the education system, for example by linking both curricula and assessments to digital resources. Nonetheless, some decision makers are committed to ubiquitous computing.

Maine is expanding its program into high schools and Massachusetts Commissioner of Education David Driscoll says of the state's new one-to-one pilot program in the Berkshires, "This really is an opportunity to truly change the way teaching and learning occurs in our classrooms.... [T]his should be statewide."

We already know much about how to implement ubiquitous computing and about its potential to improve education. For example, Lessons learned about providing laptops for all students identifies supports needed to implement effective one-to-one programs. Yet, because these programs are new, there is still much to be learned, and several major research studies are under way, including a large-scale randomized experiment in Maine, studying the effects of teacher professional development to use software applets in teaching middle school mathematics. As the Ubiquitous Computing Eval- uation Consortium co-director, I am optimistic about the results and look forward to the study findings.